Printing

When printing businesses need better images

Image quality is the cornerstone of printing. But there’re at least 2 scenarios where the need for better digital images is particularly high:

  • when working with user-provided pictures

  • when printing on large canvases

In the first case, photos are often compressed and resized by social media and messenger apps. While these pictures might look perfectly fine on screen, their quality isn’t suitable for printing, even in smaller formats.

If you do large-size printing, you have the same struggle amplified. Even photos in their original size might be too small. Everything from posters and banners to exhibition graphics and billboards needs high-resolution images to print at a sufficient DPI.

How Claid API can help

With Claid, you can restore the quality of user-uploaded images and prepare photos for printing at any size.

Restore the quality of user-generated images

Printing marketplaces and POD startups can use Claid API to:

  • Increase resolution and detail with a neural network trained for low-res pictures.

  • Remove compression artifacts.

  • Make pixelated or blurry images sharp and clean.

  • Fix colors and lighting.

  • Get the aspect ratio you need. Crop, fit and place images into 16:9, 4:3 and other frames. See the Fit section to learn more.

Prepare for large-size prints with AI

Large-size printing services can:

  • Use Claid to enhance images and make them ready for large format printing. Exhibitions, wall art, posters — print at any size at 300 DPI or other pixel density.

  • Leverage true upscaling. Unlike basic interpolation methods, our AI adds missing pixels based on image content. It increases image resolution while improving quality and detail.

  • Blow up photos up to 16x and 500 MP.

How printing companies use Claid API

Mixtiles, a POD company, upsizes users’ images that don’t meet target resolution with Claid. This helps Mixtiles always deliver crisp and clear prints to their customers no matter how badly the input pictures were compressed.

“Using Claid API, we’ve basically taken a shortcut. We don't have to worry about image quality. We've solved a common problem we faced with user-generated content. This part is also fully automated.”

— Ido Grosberg, Engineering Team Lead at Mixtiles

Some raw numbers:

  • On average, Mixtites upscales pictures from 0.7 to 3.5 MP. This means 5 times higher pixel density.

  • The company also simplified its minimum requirements. It dropped from 800 x 800 to 499 x 499 pixels, allowing Mixtiles to reject fewer photos.

Read the full case study here.

API guide

Check out how Claid API helps to prepare digital images for printing. Following is an example of a photo in quality that users often upload to web-to-print services.

Tip: click on the image to see it in full size.

Claid restored image quality, increased the resolution, cleaned up some artifacts and slightly enhanced colors. We effectively went from 111 DPI to 222 DPI for a 6x4 inch print.

Below is an API Claid request that gives this result. We will show the request and further explain the options used to get this result. For complete information on the Claid API parameters, please visit the Image Processing API section.

POST /v1-beta1/image/edit
Host: api.claid.ai
Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_API_KEY}
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "input": "{YOUR IMAGE URL}",
  "operations": {
    "resizing": {
      "width": "200%",
      "height": "200%"
    },
    "adjustments": {
      "hdr": {
        "intensity": 20
      }
    },
    "restorations": {
      "upscale": "faces"
    }
  },
  "output": {
    "metadata": {
      "dpi": 300
    },
    "format": {
      "type": "jpeg",
      "quality": 90
    }
  }
}

input is an original image URL. Go to Image I/O to learn more.

resizing block describes the image size. It can define the exact resolution or an upscaling factor. In our case, the width and height of the image will be increased by 200%. In this way, we preserve the aspect ratio and double the resolution and the PPI for the print. See Resizing section to learn about this and other supported options.

adjustments specifies color adjustments applied to an image. Here, we have an ML-powered HDR algorithm applied with 20% intensity that intelligently tunes colors and shadows. Color Adjustments section describes this in detail.

restorations block allows choosing from a wide range of neural networks to decompress and upscale images. Here, we went with "faces" as an upscaling mode. This network is trained to preserve facial features when upsizing portraits. Go to Restorations section to learn more about how Claid can restore image quality.

output block states that we want to create a JPEG with a quality of 90 and DPI of 300. In the API response, we will receive a temporary URL of a resulting image. Please consult Image I/O for an explanation of this block, and Storages section if you want to connect Claid API directly with your Cloud Storage in a secure way.

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